Mitch Wheat - Treat the cause, not the symptoms!

Nick followed up on my C# snippet post with a nice piece about using code snippets in Visual Studio 2005 and using a snippet editor to create and share your own code snippets. His post reminded me that I had forgotten to mention that to use that snippet you will need to add a “using System.Data.SqlClient;” and System.Data to your references.

Nick mentioned the VB.NET version of the code snippets editor; you can download Snippy, a Visual Studio C# Snippet Editor from GotDotNet (soon to disappear; come on Microsoft, I’m sure it wouldn’t break the bank to keep this running. I ask myself if Google would close down a similar site…) [BTW, Brian Madsen one of our other Perth MVP’s loves VB.NET with a passion. He is going to kill me for saying that :)… ]

I was also going to recommended having a look at the gotcodesnippets.com site but the second C# snippet I looked at was flawed: don’t use the singleton that is posted there. It’s not thread safe. Use this one instead: C# Singleton Best Practice. The gotcodesnippets site could be improved by having some sort of comment or peer review voting system (similar to regexlib, for example), otherwise it is in danger of spreading incorrect information. I suppose this is always the danger with such open sites. I’m sure there are many useful snippets there; just don’t go using them without checking first. One nice feature is that the site is RSS enabled so you can be notified of new code snippet uploads.